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Those in favor of these programs have trotted out the same rhetorical question we hear every time privacy advocates oppose ID checks, video cameras, massive databases, data mining, and other wholesale surveillance measures: “If you aren’t doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?”
Some clever answers: “If I’m not doing anything wrong, then you have no cause to watch me.” “Because the government gets to define what’s wrong, and they keep changing the definition.” “Because you might do something wrong with my information.” My problem with quips like these – as right as they are – is that they accept the premise that privacy is about hiding a wrong. It’s not. Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect.
Two proverbs say it best: Quis custodiet custodes ipsos? (“Who watches the watchers?”) and “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Cardinal Richelieu understood the value of surveillance when he famously said, “If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.” Watch someone long enough, and you’ll find something to arrest – or just blackmail – with. Privacy is important because without it, surveillance information will be abused: to peep, to sell to marketers and to spy on political enemies – whoever they happen to be at the time.
Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we’re doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance.
We do nothing wrong when we make love or go to the bathroom. We are not deliberately hiding anything when we seek out private places for reflection or conversation. We keep private journals, sing in the privacy of the shower, and write letters to secret lovers and then burn them. Privacy is a basic human need.
”The Value of Privacy
(via wilwheaton)
Old (2006) but even more relevant than back then. Indeed, already the awareness of surveillance causes extensive damage to individuals and the fabric of society, by “chilling” perfectly legitimate and useful activities.
E.g., if I, as a scientist, would feel that I would have to formulate every email to a colleague with the same care as the manuscript we are authoring together for publication – because of what it would look like to an outsider unaware of context –, not a lot of these emails, or multi-author papers, would ever get written. For one paper, my colleague counted a thousand emails! And it’s collaboration across disciplines where the interesting things happen…
This is more than theory.
(via weetweetie)
